July 07, 2008

Appreciating Walter Netsch: A new book

With the memorial service for Walter A. Netsch being held at 4 p.m. today at the Arts Club of Chicago, I found myself paging through a thoughtful new book devoted to Netsch's life and career on the train into work this morning. The book, "Walter A. Netsch, FAIA: A Critical Appreciation and Sourcebook" ($30, hardback) has just been published by Northwestern University Press, though Netsch was able to see a copy before he died on June 15.

One of the highlights of the book is a short biography by Russell Clement, head of the art collection at the Netsch-designed Northwestern University Library. It's lucidly written and rich with telling details and anecdotes, like the story of how, in 1947, Netsch (just hired by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) drove to the SOM-designed town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee "in his Raymond Loewy-designed yellow Studebaker convertible, to which he had attached a propeller on the front as a joke."

But the most moving part of the essay comes from Netsch himself, a long quotation in which he recalls a visit he made to Chartres Cathedral in 1955 as he worked to redesign what would become his masterpiece, the Cadet Chapel at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., after U.S. Senators' severe criticism of the initial design had reduced him to tears. Here is his vivid recollection of Chartres:

"It was sense of place--you know, [like] the Air Force Academy out in the middle of nowhere...[I]t had the guts and strength that I didn't see in Notre-Dame. It was tremendous. I walked inside and there was an organ playing...It vibrated. There was a little wedding of a townsman and a townswoman, just a few people in a side chapel, getting married, and I was just breathless. I was under one of the towers. I had just hardly gotten in the building. I just couldn't believe it. I retreated, because I felt like I was intruding on a special moment, and walked around the building...I found a restaurant that faced the church so I could look at the building and eat...

"What was important to me was...that it had been built over time and still had order. There wasn't a momentous charge in style or anything at Chartres. And it had the early windows and the later windows, and you could see the structural density that was required for the original rose window and the later open rose window which was much glasser. You could see the evolution of structure in details like that. Then you realized that all of these people were putting this together out of what they knew, but with great skill--great skill. All of the skill that I had heard about in the lectures at MIT was nothing compared to what I was looking at. I just thought, how can I do this in Colorado? How? But the Gothic form, this soaring form, the complex geometry, was something that was inspiring. How could that be the final result?"

The essay ends memorably, too, with Netsch offering a pithy summation of his core design principles:

"Sometimes someone asks, 'What do you think are the most important buildings you've done?' You think of why. One, this broke the rule; two, it has good social purpose; three, it works; and four, you see them in place in the environment and they don't feel strange. In fact, they look so natural sitting there that you think the rest of the world looks just like that."